In the middle of the Trans-Volga swamps near Dubna, near Moscow, there is an empty ball as high as a five-story building. How, why and when he got there - no one knows. He just lies there, and therefore is so absolute that the people did not even come up with a name for him, simply dignifying "Shar near Dubna".
Photos and impressions - February 2016.
I have an acquaintance in Moscow who, at least then, regularly took trips to the Moscow region, to some remote places and unconventional sights of the most inhabited region of Russia. Usually the hike consisted of three levels of difficulty, about 25, 30+ and 40 kilometers each, and I was consistently enough only for the first one, and two out of five hikes ended up with minor leg injuries - alas, I'm too poorly prepared physically for this genre. But that winter I walked with pleasure, perhaps I will walk again this winter, and even more so I could not miss the hike to the Sharu near Dubna. This is about his map - through the villages signed in yellow, we went "there", and back - straight to Dubna, and in terms of mileage it was one of the most sparing hikes.
Having met on a cold damp morning in a train carriage at the Savyolovsky station, for the first two hours we drove from the capital to the north, dozing on each other's laps.
The picturesque station Savyolovo is one of the most distant points of the Moscow Region electric train:
Promotional video:
Only this is not the Moscow region already, but the Tver region, the town of Kimry. The border of the regions runs along the Volga here, and if the Dubna near Moscow overflows slightly to the left bank, then the Tver Kimry - to the right. In the center of the city there is a very beautiful bridge over the Volga … but the canvas and the bulls are from the 1970s, and the shrouds were from the 2000s.
The group assembled against the background of the bridge over the Volga. On the left, in blue and green jackets, runners Gulya and Lena. In all campaigns, they, as well as Sergei, who did not walk this time, walked a couple of kilometers ahead of the rest of the group. Most of the group stretched in line of sight from each other, and Olya and I invariably walked last, usually remaining alone in the end.
Fishermen on the Volga were catching something right in the middle of the city:
The Kimry with their teremki deserve a separate trip and a separate post, or maybe more than one. Under the tsar, there was a huge, well-maintained village, where the best boots in Russia were sewn, getting rich, but remaining "among the people"; under the Soviets, they made a city out of it, building khrushchob and factories. It turned out something very original, and obviously not for dating "on the run".
And that time we were just enough for a race through the city center in Zarechye, where at the last towers we went to the store and plunged into the PAZik that drove up:
Which was soon left near the village of Fedorovka (on the map Fedorovskoe, since this is the center of a rural settlement), from where they began a hiking trip:
But walking slowly through the Russian province, you can see many interesting details. Here is someone in the window with a charming curtain:
There is wooden Art Nouveau not only in Kimry, but also in the surrounding villages:
In the middle of the village, a lone Soldier-Liberator with a broken pipe in the background:
Cemetery at the edge:
Apply by hand to the next village with the sonorous name of Gubin-Ugol. It looks no less interesting on the map - a donut with a hole around a small lake, to which we then, alas, did not guess, and I did not know about such a strange device. According to legend, a long time ago a whole forest fell into the ground here, and in any case, now the depth of the lake is more than 30 meters.
I paid attention only to a clearly pre-revolutionary large stone building and a more modest house at a distance, visible behind a pink jacket:
… Boots in Kimry have been made at least since the 16th century - first for themselves, and since the most profitable business in this barren land was boiling, it was necessary to make shoes conscientiously. Under Peter I, Kimry shoemakers became suppliers of the army, and this, as you know, was the most profitable business at all times. So Kimry turned into an all-Russian center of shoemaking, where, at the same time, until the beginning of the twentieth century, all production remained purely handicraft. And of course, it was not only about the Kimry themselves, who stood out because the boots were also sold there, but about their entire neighborhood, and his own shoe magnate was here in almost every village. So Gubin-Ugol was held firmly by the merchant Martynov, who was the "godfather" for his fellow villagers, and to many in the literal sense of the word. On the shore of the lake he built himself a manor house with a bath,where his wife walked through the covered gallery without dressing. A stone Church of the Intercession was erected nearby (1858), and on the road passing through the village - a school (1872), which also served as an almshouse. Built for itself and for God did not survive Soviet times, but what was built for people, that is, that very school from the frame above, still stands.
There are also many wooden houses with carved platbands, and even in ordinary peasant huts, where boots were unlikely to be sewn, a wooden Art Nouveau crept from the Kimr chambers:
Behind the village began a long and boring road between forests and swamps. We walked along it well at first, but soon it became clear that it wasn’t very good - in the absence of windbreaks and gullies, we went to Sharu near Dubna in bad ice. Having got wet in the melted snow, the dirt road all went in ruts, and as soon as it froze, the edges of these ruts became hard and slippery. That is why one wrong step - and you go … I have a good balance, and at first I sometimes rolled, but did not fall. Further, however, every time I slipped from a sharp movement, my leg began to bend in the calves, or even in the hip, and therefore I began to fall with such a noise that the ATVs or jeeps scurrying through the villages slowed down nearby, wondering if I needed help.
As I understand it, off-road here is notable at any time. In the village of Lartsevo, even a shishiga was found, at that time familiar to me from the Polar Urals:
Jeeps and quadriks are not the transport of local villagers, who have long forgotten how to sew boots, but Muscovites, who at one time bought summer cottages along the Upper Volga.
But the huts here, too, with a touch of rural modernity:
Beyond Casket the road became quite hellish, and of course we breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the homemade sign "To the Ball":
A little more along the path, a couple of more falls - and above the bushes in front, like a crescent moon, a tropical moon looking down appeared:
The ball grows over the edge:
And the first tourists or summer residents who came across it might well have thought that an alien ship had landed in the Tver region:
The ball is 18 meters in diameter and is well anchored to the ground. In fact, this is nothing more than a radio dome, scientifically speaking, "A radio-transparent dome of a command-program-trajectory radio link for controlling military spacecraft", but in fact it is just a canopy over delicate radar equipment, which covered it from the weather. Such white balls are not at all uncommon in the former USSR - offhand, I can remember such over Anapa, even over Amderma. But they never stand alone, and here there are no signs of even a closed and destroyed object. That is, the Shar near Dubna was never used for its intended purpose, and the versions of its origin are one more exotic than the other. For example, that the ball was carried in a helicopter and dropped; or that the military signalmen wanted to build their sanatorium here and thus staked out a place,and then something went wrong. Finally, it could just be a "trick" for enemy reconnaissance satellites, and this version seems the most plausible to me.
Be that as it may, in this glade, the ball appeared somewhere between 1980 and 1986 - such a scatter of dates is apparently caused by the presence of evidence that there was definitely no ball here before 1980, but after 1986 it certainly was. Well, the glory came to Sharu somewhere at the end of the 2000s, when the past crisis pressed many people just enough that they still had enough to live on, but not to travel to Europe. I remember how the people then suddenly began to look around, and among the many finds of the Moscow region, away from the paths of school trips, this ball appeared. The peak of interest in him came at the beginning of the 2010s, but then he moved into the category of "pop" and everyday life.
So Olya and I, coming up to the Ball last, heard a SOUND - Gulnara and Lena sang beautifully inside the ball, and outside it sounded as if they were singing into a microphone. Without thinking twice, I ran up to the wall of the ball and kicked it with all the foolishness - they quieted down inside, and as they said later, they even got a little scared - the sound was as if a wheel had burst near at least.
For the sake of acoustics, the ball is mainly walked, and the culmination of its fame was an acoustic concert on February 18, 2012.
Inside. The ball, of course, is not quite a ball, but a truncated sphere attached to the ground with powerful fasteners:
There is a mysterious hole in the wall that looks like a keyhole. Most likely, Shar was transported by helicopter, and a cable was attached here.
Under the ceiling is its cold Sun:
There is a multiple echo of reverberation inside the ball, any sound here begins to live its own life, having separated from the source. But under the dome, all this mixes, turning into a bizarre cacophony, but if you leave the ball outside, there will be a powerful and clear sound, spreading far across the forest. Alas, we didn't think to make a recording then, but these sound effects were worth hours of walking on ice.
But they did not forget about the collective photo - they tried to pretend that we were dancing, but even the whole group was not enough on one side of the ball:
And then they walked for a long time to Dubna through the forest, where a wide clearing leaves the field:
In the forest, someone was hunting for a hunting ground:
A couple of hours later, a clearing led us to the boathouses of the Moscow Sea. In summer, boats and yachts walk here, and in winter there are more snowmobiles than in the Far North.
The gloomy winter landscape of the Moscow Sea with the hellish flame of the state district power station in Konakovo:
In a straight line to its pipes, more than 20 kilometers, of which the frozen reservoir accounts for only 4.5 kilometers - Konakovo stands on the other side of the bend. The lights of any equipment such as snowmobiles and quadrics are also visible in the frame above - it was not possible to photograph them in motion at dusk.
On the dam there is a mysterious tumbled down obelisk, possibly even from the 1930s, when the Ivankovskaya hydroelectric power station was being built.
Having reached the end of the dam, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Dubna at night, and jumped into a bus driving by, half the way to the station, seeing the rest of the group, stubbornly walking forward along the city streets. At the railway station in Dubna there was a Bathhouse on Wheels painted for a log house, which, you see, is sometimes called into the wilderness of the forests by all these owners of yachts and snowmobiles.
In Dubna, where the periodic table is multiplied, I was very good in 2014 and wrote about it in three parts. This is an interesting city, and very unusual for Russia.